John Niedermeyer is a Brooklyn-based design manager and internets enthusiast at <a href="http://buzzfeed.com">BuzzFeed</a>. Previously, he was a digital designer and editor at <a href="http://nytimes.com">The New York Times</a>.

New design for the homepage of time.com, the website of Time Magazine.

Time Mag­a­zine start­ed rolling out a redesign of time.com yes­ter­day – it was designed by my friend and for­mer col­league Sean Vil­lafran­ca, who left our group at the Times ear­li­er this year to become the Design Direc­tor for time.com.

It strikes me as a wel­come depar­ture from its pre­vi­ous CNN-esque iter­a­tion, and a lit­tle more faith­ful to the print design. I like the use of Ari­al Black, and the dar­ing use of the TIME word­mark on the white back­ground. (Dar­ing because it would’ve been far more pre­dictable to use the word­mark reversed on a red back­ground.)

They seem to have only rolled-out the home page and the arti­cle pages at this point – sec­tion fronts still show the lega­cy design. But on the whole, it’s a very good improve­ment to a very good news resource – just in time for the gen­er­al elec­tion sea­son.

ALSO – A few birdies tell me to expect some major design changes to wsj.com today or tues­day, com­ing hot-off-the-heels of their mag­a­zine launch this month. Yes, we’ve heard this before, but there are some pre­view screen­shots out there. Stay Tuned!

2 Responses to “Time.com Redesign”

I couldn’t dis­agree more. While the old Time.com site may have left some things to be desired, it was at least easy to scan the page and see what was new and worth read­ing (think­ing in par­tic­u­lar of the slideshow of the 5 new arti­cles). Now, I find the site to bor­der on gar­ish and the cacoph­o­ny of dif­fer­ent font and pic­ture sizes makes it ter­ri­bly dif­fi­cult to scan for infor­ma­tion. Yes­ter­day, for exam­ple, Time ran an arti­cle on the poi­son­ing of babies in Chi­na. And I nev­er saw it, because it was nev­er linked off the front page (as near as I can tell). I regret the redesign and wish they had a way for us to view the site with the old lay­out.

As an aside: why do ver­ti­cal pink bars cov­er your site when it’s ren­dered in Safari? They make it impos­si­ble to inter­act with the site.… You men­tion you’re using a Mac in your colophon.…

@M. Antho­ny Aiel­lo, the pink bars are only sup­posed to show when you press CTRL+SHIFT+G or CTRL+ALT+G, but I real­ize that it does it when you type just “G”. Its part of this pack­age, which enables design­ers to quick­ly add a grid to their site.

I left it on because I thought that it was inter­est­ing to see, but I agree that it is annoy­ing when you’re try­ing to nav­i­gate around. I’ll remove it.